Home... In About 23 Hours

It's really hard to believe that our trip to New Zealand is over. This has to have been the fastest month of our lives. The only thing that's left is a grueling flight itinerary that involves flying an hour and a half from Christchurch up to Auckland, followed by a twelve hour flight to Los Angeles, and then a six hour flight to New York.

Including layover time, and depending on traffic driving from JFK, it should take about 23 hours for us to get home. And it's funny, but we leave on Tuesday afternoon, travel all this time, and yet still arrive home in New Jersey on Tuesday, the same day.

I was all excited about getting a free day, until Laura reminded me that we lost a day going out here. Just like karma, it all evens out in the end.

This trip has been amazing. We've met many new people, made some new friendships and cemented some old ones, and of course we've seen countless sights of natural beauty. We'll try to summarize, as best we can, our thoughts and reflections on this trip and this country in an upcoming post.

One final note: if you haven't figured out by now, our blog ended up lagging reality by nearly a month, as we decided to present the substance of our trip in short episodic posts, rather than extra-long posts that literally described each day's activities. We hope this made our blog more of a pleasure to read, even if it didn't exactly match the actual timeframe of our trip.